A place to exercise ideas before writing about them with greater discipline.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

“Power to the People” Reemerges in Germany

Mine is the generation that
chanted “Power to the People” in response to the American military presence in
Vietnam and a general recognition that large sectors of the population (women
being a major example) were being deprived of equal rights. It was an age of
considerable irritation. However, with the election of Richard Nixon as
President of the United States, it seemed as if that irritation was
anesthetized, rather than addressed.

It is thus interesting to see that
“the principle of the thing” has resurfaced, just not in the United States. The
new manifestation is the rise of the Pirate Party in several European
countries. A BBC News report
by Stephen Evans covering the recent conference of the Pirate Party in Germany
has conferred a certain element of legitimacy on the movement, even if the
report seemed to say more about the celebratory (i. e. party) atmosphere,
rather than the practice of politics. Nevertheless, “power to the people” was
clearly a driving force behind those practices. However, I think it was this
quote from Matthias Schrade that escalated the Pirate Party above the protests
of my own generation:

We offer what people want.
People are really angry at all the other parties because they don't do what
politicians should do. We offer transparency, we offer participation. We offer
basic democracy.

If we can use a noun as general
as “people,” we are talking about a population base that is not particularly
interested in governing. They have their own things to do. This is why the
world continues to look at our Constitution as a blueprint for not only the
concept of representative
government but also the nuts and bolts required to implement that concept.
To the extent that we can talk about failures of governments, those failures
can be traced back to the fact that those chosen as representatives by the
electorate reject the tacit obligation to actually represent the voters in
favor of representing those with stronger (read financial) powers
to influence, exercised in the lobbies of the building in which they are
supposed to be doing the work of government. In other words “transparency” may
be the most important noun in the above quote.

There has been a lot of talk
about the failure of the concept of a nation-state. This seems misplaced. The
real question is whether the exercise of representation will always be limited
to that
1% targeted by the Occupy movements. In the spirit of those Occupy
movements, the Pirate Party is trying to restore representation to the 99%.
Their methods, like any other methods, deserve scrutiny; but, if we fall back
on a knee-jerk rejection of their basic goal, then we may as well accept the likelihood
that we have lost any hope of representation at any level of government.